New Media Companies in India

I tend to group new media companies in India into a few buckets. There are aggregators. And then there are brands. You can slice them further by the type of content they carry or their business model. Here’s a quick list of such companies that I put together. I’ve also pieced together some information about what they do or how they make money for those who are interested.

Overall, the trend seems to be that aggregators work on the traditional cost per click model. Brands seem to be liking native advertising (see ScoopWhoop’s model below). Events have also emerged as a strong revenue source, although its quickly getting commoditized and pure play event/ conference companies as well as community driven events are entering the space.

Aggregators

Inshorts: Manually summarized news snippets. No original reporting. Loaded with cash, out to hire & acquire. Has over 1 2 million downloads on Android and is purely focussed on mobile. (Update: They were earlier called Newsinshorts.)

DailyHunt: Local language content, e-books & unbundled magazine stories. Loaded with cash. Innovating on payments. Over 10 million Android downloads. Focussed on mobile. (Update: They were earlier called NewsHunt.)

The biggest threat for aggregators are Facebook, Google and Twitter. Users are increasingly discovering content on these platforms which are getting smarter and smarter.

Brands

Scroll: General news, heavy on politics and culture. Slight left leanings. Brilliant website which is light and mobile friendly. Does a lot of original reporting, which makes it a serious journalistic play.

The Wire: Political & general news. More here. Siddharth Varadarajan, former editor of The Hindu runs this publication.

The News Minute: Political & general news. Breaks stories & does original reporting. Former Times Now reporter Dhanya Rajendran and Chitra Subramaniam who broke the Bofors Scandal back in the day run this publication.